[anfractuosity]

I'm just looking at the friendly arm website at some of the other NanoPi's, which I'd not heard of before, I'm quite tempted by the Gbps ethernet. How do you find the software/OS support, are they pretty reliable, with longish uptimes?

[pero]

i have some nanopi neo(1)s and they're rock solid - my rule of thumb with arm boards is that support is good enough if it has an armbian _debian_ (vs just armbian ubuntu) release

[anfractuosity]

Cheers I might look at getting one then, as I had problems with my Pi's network connectivity being slow compared to a laptop's using the same ethernet over power line adapter.

[pero]

no idea about PoE on either board but if i/o is a concern you might want to take a look at the $25 rock64 with gbe and usb3 - i/o on my neo1 maxes out somewhere just below 20mb/s but my rock64 has no problem doing 80mb/s with some ancient spinny disks and some armbian devs have done ~200mb/s with ssds iirc

os support on the rock64 is not quite there yet however but given the features@pricepoint i expect it to catch up

[squarefoot]

I've used some of their NanoPI M1 and other similar boards by other vendors (Orange PI PC and Zero) with great success, although not in any cluster configuration (mainly SDR and other "normal" stuff). The power/price ratio is generally more favorable compared to the RasPI boards, and there is some good information on the Armbian forums on how to get fine CPU throttling, which would probably be of interest in such a scenario.